you need a proper chart for that, I don't like coinmarketcap.com charts for this purpose, they are mostly for seeing the overall change. and they lack details. use an exchange chart or sites like bitcoinwisdom that offer services like this using different exchanges.

the indications are not always easy. sometimes they go away but come back again to surprise you. but most of the times, it is slow down in the price rise, reaching a high price compared to before which is usually 20-30% higher, drop in volume, and also it is sometimes ending with a drop or one of those red candles so to speak.

the "predictions" are all over the place actually. as much as there are those who are screaming about $1 million per bitcoin there are others who are screaming bubble and how bitcoin is going to drop hard.

most of them, no matter which side they are on, are full of it though. they are just emotional and they want to make a profit from bitcoin. those who say it will go up want to dump, and those who say it will drop want to either short bitcoin or buy some more at the bottom because they missed out.

it is worth mentioning that there are some good speculations out there too, you just have to look for them. sometimes on tradingview there are good ones. but most of these people who make it to news sites are just hyping things or FUDing their asses off.

this is just another ethereum advertisement performed slyly by including bitcoin price in the article and playing on people emotions.

one thing that people usually forget is that bitcoin is one and only cryptocurrency that is referred to as the decentralized currency in the world. but when it  comes to etheruem it is just another altcoin among thousands of others and at least two dozen similar platforms just like ethereum, some of which are even better platforms than it is. and yet people think it can get pumped that much!

the answer is maybe, not yes or no.

for example this 146vFp1nePNtpxfefNcNtaEvTjNhytNrnT is my bitcoin address. you can see the transactions coming and going. but that is all you can see. if I sign up on an exchange for example and give them my identification and then make a deposit from this address or withdraw to this one, that links it to me (just an example). but until I make that link, I am anonymous.

you can see Satoshi Nakamoto and how anonymous that is.

litecoin is the same as bitcoin with a much bigger potential blockchain size which makes running a node harder and much bigger orphan risk which makes trusting transactions with low number of confirmation that much harder. it also suffers the same scaling issues as bitcoin

Monero is the anonymous coin we all know but that high level of anonymity associated it with so many illegal activities that makes it something that regular people will stay away from. it also has much worse scaling issues than bitcoin.

ETH has smart contracts so does two dozen other projects. additionally bitcoin has smart contracts through RootStock. and let me ask you this: when was the last time you used a smart contract? where do you know "in real world" that a smart contract is absolutely necessary and is being used for real not for some short term fund raising to scam people and go away?

BCH is also exactly like bitcoin, it just has bigger blocks. it suffers the same scaling issues as bitcoin.

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in short, bitcoin is not just a name. there is bitcoin, then there are altcoins that are not really better than bitcoin. that is why bitcoin keeps rising and altcoins do not.

yeah bitcoin can function as the digital gold, store of value, .... but at the same time it is a currency and that is w here it gets its real value that bitcoin is capable of keeping it and not just lose it when the speculators leave.
the price rise is also a part of that in my opinion. people invest in bitcoin long term because it is a decentralized currency. otherwise they would claim to be holding long term when they actually dump when the price rises and they fear losing their fiat value.

not always and it is impossible to make profit on all your trades but I am happy that my total is positive. I have made more money than I have lost and I take it as a good sign. it has never been easy though. sometimes you have to make hard decisions to accept a loss in order to prevent a bigger one or to make profit later on.
this market requires a lot of experience in my opinion. because things such as technical analysis and lots of other more logical reasons do not work most of the times. for instance there are times where an altcoin is rising when it should have been falling and it is falling when it should have been rising!
this makes everything that much harder but it is possible to make a sense of all this in time.


1. buying an already pumped altcoin
2. holding altcoins longer than I should

nobody can help you more than yourself.
what you need to do is that to spend some time going through all your trades one by one and see where you went wrong. for example look into your history and see what was the first coin you bought. now try to think why you bought it, what was your reason and why that reason was wrong and look at the charts of that coin to see what happened to the price after you bought in and until the day you sold or until today if you have not yet done it.
this helps you to figure out your problems, eliminate your wrong way of thinking and finally helps you improve your decision making in trading.

you can also share more details here about the coins you bought and ask others help you out and tell you where you went wrong.


you may want to reconsider using bittrex. they have been acting very suspicious lately. there are lots of scam accusations open against this exchange...

I expect this rise to continue on the same trend that it currently is on until it reaches $11k or even $12k in a very short time because there is a lot of money coming in these days according to exchange stats and also with looking at the huge growth in the trading volume.

but when those higher prices were reached we may see some downtime. even big drops and lots of FUD because it is time!
every time we have a rally like this when a big rise happens and new unexpected ATHs are set, the FUD machines start right after. it starts with a simple correction then continues to get bigger with FUD and then jumps back up on the same previous trend again.

bitcoin is a decentralized currency which works based on its users or peers on the network. as long as there is at least 1 peer on this network who has the blockchain, or in other words runs a full node, and as long a he mines bitcoin, it will remain alive.

note that if everyone stops mining bitcoin and that 1 peer is left, the difficulty will also drop down and it won't be as high so it will be easier for him to mine bitcoin.

p.s. bitcoin is just starting, why would it stop at the beginning?!

I don't know what are these rumors you are referring to, but the announcements regarding bitcoin futures have been pretty clear and coming from CME group directly. there was nothing to doubt and become rumor.

and as for the effects, I believe the current rally is mostly because of that news. and when the price rise begins, everyone else joins in. it is not just because they are adding a market and that market is attracting investors, but instead it is the news about them adding the market which is putting bitcoin on the radar of many investors who now are seeing bitcoin as a valuable option to invest in. and as the demand increases the FOMO buyers start joining in and price rise becomes fast. probably even reaching $12k pretty soon.

a watch only wallet is a wallet that only has your public keys (bitcoin addresses) and does not have your private keys (keys you need to spend bitcoin). that is the only difference. and it has nothing to do with your balance and how much it is showing up in your wallet interface.

I am not familiar with Armory but I believe it is showing as 0 because you still do not have the whole blockchain. you need to wait until all of it is downloaded. which is a file bigger than 150 GB.

while you are waiting for that to complete, you can use an online block explorer like blockchain.info to check your balance with your bitcoin address. just to put your mind at ease and be sure that you have received the funds.

bitcoin has always been rising too fast and something similar to this, what makes you think this is not normal?

why? do you own a future telling machine to make this kind of prediction?

and why $7000? did you just select a random number because that is how it looks like to me!

stay away from bittrex, they have turned into a scam exchange service. you can read the scam accusations against them: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=96390
and look at their topic for more explanation: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=463202.1720

the rest of these exchanges aren't any better either. they all suffer the same flaw of not being regulated and be shady. they can easily run away at any time they wish to. and so far there has been a dozen big exchanges that have ran away with large amounts of bitcoin. sometimes they simply disappear and sometimes they tell some lies about being hacked or something and sometimes like bittrex they simply close lots of accounts selectively and be silent about it.

you may ask what is the solution? well there aren't any simple ones. you either have to suck it up and accept the risk of getting scammed by the exchange you trust and withdraw your money each time. or you have to stop trading! or you have to use decentralized exchanges which are harder for traders.

a risky advice but in my opinion the best thing that can be done: Sell now and next time you invest in a token like this make sure you have a better reason for doing so.

I said risky because you never know with these things, they can get pumped right after you sell and you miss out. but it is a good advice (in my opinion) because you never know with these things! it can also continue getting dumped.

besides if you sell you have your money at hand ready to be invested in something with potential or something that is rising at the moment for example. I don't want to advertise anything here but a quick look at the list of altcoins you can always find something that is rising.
for example while your money is tied up in this token which is losing money, coins like PIVX are getting pumped. it is already pumped about 50-60%

first of all what other cryptocurrencies? you mean shitcoins! you shouldn't even be comparing bitcoin to shitcoins.

secondly you are talking about anonymity of bitcoin compared to others. that is true but you forget that majority of people who come to use bitcoin are not looking for the maximum possible anonymity. what bitcoin offers (which is not full anonymity) is more than enough for most of them. besides those anon coins have lots of issues. for example most of them are not even anonymous! they just do some stuff and claim to be. some others such as Monero have scaling issues.

which brings us to the last thing you mentioned about fees. we all know fees are currently high and that is unacceptable but you can not compare it with altcoin fees. altcoins are unused networks and because of that they can not have higher fees.
fee is also a supply and demand relationship. the supply is the block space which is limited and the demand is the number of transactions.
for example this supply for bitcoin is 1 MB (4 MB with SegWit) and the demand is bigger than that.
the same for bitcoin cash is 8 MB but the demand for it is 0.1-0.2 MB which means fees will be much lower. the same is true for the rest of the altcoins.

this is uncharted territory now, we can not make accurate predictions anymore. imagine how hard it has always been to predict bitcoin price, now it is even harder.

on one hand we have this price rise of this year which was big so far. many even call it a bubble (like they always do!) and there is always panic in cases like this and many would also want to cash out their profit after the long time they held their coins.

on the other hand, bitcoin is still bitcoin. the same scarce currency with a limited supply and increasing demand. with all the media attentions and all the price rise all the good news and all the mainstream adoption, and lots more,... there is a lot of money being invested in bitcoin these days. and this will only increase in the future! what I am trying to say is that the rise is somewhat justifiable to a point where you can say it is even small, it should have been a much bigger rise already in the past 8 or 9 years.

what is the harm in bitcoin?! it is another currency on the internet which is easily traceable since all the transactions are open to public view on the blockchain. saying kids are being corrupted because of bitcoin is an excuse the politicians make to cover up their fuck ups.

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what's up with these types of topics that I keep seeing in this board? is it some kind of spam bot? the same patter, a useless subject is posted here in form of a poll with the same two options: bitcoin, Blockchain. and from low rank members which look more like throw away accounts!!!

satoshi being a well organized group of people, can be true. it can be a name that a developers team chose for their communication so that none of them takes credit for creating the decentralized cryptocurrency. maybe people like Hal Finney were in that group.

but government agencies? why would they create something like bitcoin which created the decentralized currency movement and led to creation of things such as Monero and all these anonymous currencies which will cause them a lot of troubles because those are really anonymous and they can not track them. this part of your theory sounds far fetched to me.

this is just some conspiracy theory that you have.

in fact from what I have seen China has never been behind any of the drops. the FUD containing the word "China" was the reason though but that doesn't mean the Chinese or their government is responsible!
everyone loves FUD, when we know we can make about 30% profit in just a couple of days because there are weak hands in the market that can be shaken out easily with the lie about some "boogieman" figure that is out trying to kill bitcoin!